A warm breeze blew through my window like a gentle wave lapping the sandy shore in summer at low tide, and as I took in a breath of air that blanketed my body like tall grass in a field I felt for just that moment in time, like I did when I was a child. I felt that I had not one worry, not one burden, nothing was on my mind accept that breeze that made the curtains swell like balloons.

When we’re unhappy at work we get a lot more competitive, for one simple reason: When work doesn’t give us happiness and enjoyment we want to get something else out of it. And what else is there but compensation and promotions.

I used to think that my job didn't have anything to do with the environment. Then I realized that my job, as well as everyone else's job, impacts the environment in some way. And now advocating for sustainability has become my No. 1 responsibility.

In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job, to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken. “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung. Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him. Job, however, remains steadfast. At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight. According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.

Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature. “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted. From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.

Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching. From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche. “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.” This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon. Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnosticc deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.

Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism. To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote. “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.

My first instinct was to get a job—an idea immediately followed by a crippling wave of nausea. I literally vomited in a trashcan on the sidewalk where I’d been pleasantly window-shopping. I found the idea of a job repulsive. Life was too short to waste being a productive member of society. My job was my imaginary life, and I felt deeply I should be paid to live it.

Sol Luckman

Source: Beginner's Luke: Book I of the Beginner's Luke Series, Pages: 30

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.